EYES
AND ARMS OF SMOKE: In Three Houses CDR (RAMPART/MOUNTAAIN)A
real simple presentation of two very heavy tracks, this might
be the most stunning Lexington, KY album since Warmer Milks'
Penetration Initials. It starts with the title track,
a gorgeous two-and-a-half minute song, a little haunted melange
from the history of music that will stay in your head for
days, the two women in the band singing an angelic medieval
folk melody ("in three houses, tra la la la la"),
while someone slaps out an ancient dance rhythm on a hand
drum (yes, I said dance) and evil electronics from the future
lurk in the corners. And then suddenly that ends and freefalls
into a super-extended 25-minute Al Silva/Celestial Communication-style
freakout with almost the same title ("In 3 Houses"),
deep-space violins and reeds clawing and wailing while electronics
grind out would-be bass lines and voices haunt and it all
sounds like it's coming from a couple space stations over,
except that in space no one can hear you jam.....unless they
have this CDR on their astro headphones. For this gigantic
coda, Tremaine and Beatty are definitely jamming from their
hours of experience in the Hair Police Terror Tank, while
Molle and O'Keefe bring in all sorts of tones that allow the
sweet and spooked strains of the stunning opening song to
linger throughout. I'm telling you, it's a doozy . . . . .
(And hey, by the way, the Terror Tank was Wolf Eyes' practice
space, not the Hair Police's, I knew that, give me a break,
I've got a lot to keep track of here....)

FE-MAIL:
Voluptuous Vultures 10" (PSYCHFORM)(review
by B. Edwards)I've
had the pleasure of seeing these Norwegian ladies twice in
the US; once in Chicago and most recently in Seattle. The
Chicago show was more "delicate," if you will, with
crackles, drones and intermittent gurgles and crashes punctuating
their set. The Seattle show, though, was a completely different
beast: more like 30,000 cattle prods jammed into a 600 foot
wall of flashbulbs while razorwire wrapped anvils were catapulted
through flaming cars.
This 10" brings
together the best of both of these elements, convincing me
that Maja and Hild are determined to kindly raise the dead,
but only as a means to strapping the physical remains to railroad
tracks and watching them splatter unpleasantly (and amusingly)
all about. On Voluptuous Vultures, the ladies are
armed with an array of electronics, voices that switch between
caterwauling ear shear and glass grinding in the throat of
an irate pit bull, and an instrumentation list that (perhaps
surprisingly) includes french horn, pan pipes, and harmonica.
In short, Maja and
Hild spit out a wild array of electronic mayhem: guttural,
filth-encrusted gristly drones are sent down the river with
shrill sine wave accompaniment; eventually a rockslide jams
the river and the water turns to blood and bathes innocent
animals with the guilt of the ill prepared. Not only do these
ladies decimate, placate, and flagellate, they balance (and
blur) the lines between such things beautifully. The apocalypse
never had such grace or swiftness. The releasing label aptly
describes parts of this record as an "electronics smorgasbord
that will leave your pets hiding in a dark corner of the bathroom,"
and that's a pretty solid assessment. Oh yes; and the cover
art! Verily, a fine cross-pollination of sassy and tacky:
not exactly what you might want but definitely more than you
deserve. Grab it now and get on the right side of the charging
bull.

FEARLESS
LEADER: God Bless The Devil CD (GULCHER)
The Afrika Korps? Gays in the Military? Lou Rone Alone??
Thundertrain??? How does Gulcher get MORE retarded with every
release? And I still love 'em all, and these guys Fearless
Leader from L.A. are definitley in the running for Gulcher's
'most retarded,' cavorting around (as they do) in way-too-colorful
corpsepaint, and playing vulgar rock that sounds almost as
much like friggin' Faster Pussycat as it does The Dictators.
And you know, they're pretty great. They do know how to rock,
with at least some mebers having also played in the Lazy Cowgirls
and/or Clawhammer, and they're funny, they really are. But
then, I can enjoy a song that goes "She's got a toxic
crotch / You know it stinks a lot." Maybe you can't.
Even better is the lyric: "Sittin' at home in my underwear
/ Baby, I-I-I-I-I I don't care!" I can relate, I'm in
my underwear right now! And it's almost noon!

THE
GOSLINGS: Between The Dead CD (NO
LABEL)This
album immediately sounded to me like Twin Infinitives-era
Royal Trux and Bullhead-era Melvins had collaborated
on an album and then baked the master tapes in a radioactive
kiln for the last 15 years. Now don't go running off to the
record store YET, come on, stay here and read the rest of
this review, at least -- I wanted to point out that it doesn't
quite sound like Neil made the session, just Jennifer on vocals,
but Buzz and Dale are there with the endless Sab-devolution
riffery, unafraid to just let a low E (D? C#??) ring for long
periods of time. But it's not Buzz, Jennifer, and Dale, it's
"Max" (guitars, other), "Leslie" (vocals,
other), and "Steve (drums, other)." On most songs
there seems to be an electronic hailstorm going on also, somewhere
in the vicinity, but I have no idea where it's coming from.
Must be the "other." Every song seems to be at least
7 minutes long, and this is some pretty lowdown decrepitude
-- a lot of the guitar riffs sound like they're coming through
a huge radio with a really bad antennae. I know nothing about
this band or where they're from, except: Max, Leslie, and
Steve.

HAIR
POLICE: Drawn Dead CD (HANSON)Speaking
of power trios, the Hair Police usually line up with Mike
Connelly on guitar/vocals, Robert Beatty on electronics, and
Trevor Tremaine on drums. But on this album Connelly and Tremaine
both play guitar while Beatty processes the whole thing in
real time. So Beatty is this album's secret weapon, and he
really rises to the occasion, creating what I just might call
a rock concrete masterpiece! Granted, he has some
great material to process here -- one guitar roars and quakes
low while the other scythes and slashes up high, and the combination
creates a perfect horror mood and just stays there, smoldering
very loudly ("the sound of a burning human body"
says the press release!). Sometimes there are screams, but
the whole thing is really one long smoldering song, and when
it moves, it usually moves only slightly, in sudden harsh
shift-splices, just often enough to keep you jumping out of
your seat. A real supremely focused piece of work...

ERIK
HINDS: Reign in Blood CD (SOLPONTICELLO)Y'know,
people send me CDs they've worked on their entire life, and
half the time I don't even listen to 'em. When and if I finally
do, it takes me months to start a review about it, and another
year after that to 'edit' the damn thing. Then, a guy sends
me a song-for-song cover album of Slayer's Reign in Blood,
and I put it on about 5 minutes after it arrives and here
I am writing a review less than a week later. What can I say,
anything related to Reign in Blood always seems to
perk the old ear up. And in a way Erik Hinds has
been working on this CD all his life; he's been listening
to Slayer since he was young (in the press release, he writes,
"It's no exaggeration to say Slayer helped sustain me
through middle and high school. I nearly wore out the grooves
of my Hell Awaits LP, stared at Live Undead
until the corpses moved, and freaked the fuck out upon hearing
Reign in Blood, one of the strongest artistic statements
ever"), and he's learned how to play an entire Slayer
album on "an upright acoustic instrument with 12 sympathetic
strings," something called an h'arpeggione (although
his website just says he plays "devil cello"), and
I don't know what a h'arpeggione looks like or how complicated
it is to play, but it sounds like he's gotten pretty good
at it. I think all that qualifies as a life's work. It's definitely
a unique interpretation of Reign in Blood -- after
all, it is all acoustic, with no vocals and lyrics, and the
riffs don't always seem to be 'note for note,' and the tone
of the instrument is almost like a hammer dulcimer -- not
very metal -- though it can also sound like a cello (very
metal) and a rather sweetly humming tambura (ethno-metal).
So not as heavy as Slayer, of course, but still pretty dark
and aggressive, while being strangely beautiful and elegant
too. Even if you don't recognize the specific Slayer song,
it still sounds like you're listening to a nice and heavy
post-Bach classical music CD. And when the Hanneman/King riffs
do unmistakably emerge, they will put a smile on your face
and perhaps even non-ironic horns in the air.

ICHOROUS:
Todekapitel CDR; VILLA VALLEY: Cycles CDR; MRTYU: Durga CDR
(all AUDIOBOT)Here
are three new CDR releases that have a few things in common.
For one, all are released by Belgium label Audiobot (a division
of the Freaks End Future empire). For another, all have great
color artwork on quality paper. For another, all feature crushing
waves of doomed-out power-noise, and for yet another, in each
case I can't really tell what the album name or artist name
is. The bright pink one with the monster on it (Todekapitel
by Ichorous) is harsh evil noise with more vocals than usual
for the genre, here scary demon talk like a gore/grind singer
doing spoken word. It's cool and gives the noise a different
spin. The next one (Cycles
by Villa Valley) is pink too, a paler pink, with more subtle
viral art. The noise, on the other hand, is even harsher than
that of Ichorous, but less focused. It also has vocals, more
traditional screamy stuff. Not bad. Two-and-a-half, maybe
three stars. And then there's the black one (Durga
by Mrtyu). It has the best cover art of the three, and the
best start, the sound of at least one-hundred warplanes
to hell making their final descent while at least one hundred
lost souls moan in anticipation. And it pretty much stays
there for the whole disc. And "there" is a stranger
place than the usual noise, a little more occult and arcane,
almost like Double Leopards or some shit. Best of the three,
in my humb. op. Anyway, some unknown names here, but from
what I can tell Ichorous is a new dude from Lowell, MA (future
site of the United States Noise Hall of Fame), Villa Valley
seems to be from Royal Oak, MI, and I have no idea where Mrtyu
is from (hell -- ed.). (Actually, I think I just
heard that Mrtyu is Antony Milton from New Zealand, recording
under yet another name. Down under, just not as far as I thought!
-- ed. again.)

ID
M THEFT ABLE: I'm On Flourescence CDR (MANG-DISC)How
am I gonna convey to you how good I think this album is? You'll
never believe me, you'll just be like, "Oh, some guy
from Portland, Maine that records noise and then packages
it in hand-assembled junk? That's a new one -- what is this,
his 27th CDR release? I'm sure it's really CUTTING EDGE."
Oh, if you only knew -- it sounds like there's about 440 cuts
per minute on the 19-minute title-track opener. It's not a
loud piece, but there's just tons of fast-moving harsh/weird
sound, pushed out with a degree of control and fine detail
that just seems unfathomable compared to the squalling average
of today's noise. A fast sliver of cut-up whatsis slips out
of the speakers, then stops suddenly for a deep breath of
silence, after which another one follows, whipping eel-like.
This happens again and again, and before long the sections
are increasing in duration, detail, and intensity -- but never
particularly in volume. It just keeps moving forward, implacable,
nothing to prove, nothing to yell and/or scream about. For
example, the fragmented voice of a woman is expertly worked
in and out of the slipstreams, and it's not unitl about ten
minutes in that you briefly realize it's a porn sample, another
noise cliché turned on its head in the hands of an
expert. Also, awesome hand-made cover art, and awesome crayon-scrawl
all over the top of the CDR.

ID M THEFT ABLE: The cover art again -- I just
wanted you all to see the lovely detail in this garbage collage.

IGNATZ
CD (K-RAA-K3)Not
only are George Herriman references always welcome, but this
is a good weird CD. Ignatz is the stage name for a guy who
lives in Belgium and has long been into lo-fi home recording.
There's some good stories in the one-sheet about him as a
younger lad, unrolling a cassette and mangling and crumpling
the tape as much as possible, then rolling it back up and
recording onto it, not to mention getting some "wow and
flutter" effects by just kicking his four-track around
the room while recording. Talk about "extended technique"!
That's not what this sounds like, though -- he's evolved into
a noisy glitched-out lone bluesman who occasionally sings
but mostly just lays down strange zoned-out instrumentals.
I like the tracks with vocals the best, in which fractured
guitar blues-chugs push along a weird blank drone slate with
alien singing clipping in and out of the mix. Nothing else
quite like it right now....

EDWARD
KA-SPEL: Laugh China Doll CD; A Long Red Ladder To The Moon
CD (both BETA-LACTAM RING)The
rather curious name of Edward Ka-Spel is one that has been
teasing around the back of my mind for awhile, but I was never
sure why. I'd certainly never heard the man's music, not that
I knew of (and knowing is indeed half the battle). I later
found out that he was/is the leader of the legendary Legendary
Pink Dots, but I've still never even heard them. What I have
now heard, thanks to Beta-lactam Ring Records and the United
States Postal Service, are two Ka-Spel solo records. And I'm
pretty damn intrigued.
First of all,
these come in VERY nice 'true gatefold' sleeves that actually
do justice to the lovely (and rather creepy) artwork. They
look and feel exactly like a deluxe gatefold LP that just
happens to be reduced to CD size, complete with readable spine.
If all CDs were packaged like this I would be pretty happy
-- to hell with jewel cases and even digipaks. Kudos to Beta-lactam
Ring for pulling it off so well. As for the music, Laugh
China Doll is a reissue of Ka-Spel's very first solo
album from 1984, and A Long Red Ladder
To The Moon is a brand new solo album from 2005. 21 years
apart, but the '05 electronics are just as vintage as the
'84, and the singing voice sounds just the same. Ka-Spel's
music is basically strange synth-pop, with arcane-but-often-sweet
and way-English melodies, literary lyrics, weird instrumental
interludes, and a lot of vintage electronic pulses and tones
that emit a spaced-out vibe and the influence of various things
like Pink Floyd (all eras) and even a little bit o' Jamaican
dub. Songs come and go with odd subtle surprises -- it can
be listenend to as challenging electronics, and also as mellow
synth-pop, but Ka-Spel really sounds like himself more than
anything, and it's pleasantly hard to put your finger on exactly
what's going on here.

CAST
KING: Saw Mill Man CD (LOCUST)A
heavy set of quiet country songs by a guy named Cast King,
from Sand Mountain, Alabama, who looks to be really getting
up there in years spent on a hardscrabble life, like any romanticized
'musical relic' of a 'fast disappearing past'. But nobody
needs to say any of that 'we'll broker that for you' bullshit
about Mr. King because he and his songs are the real-deal
stuff and Locust has put them out with appropriate plainness.
His former band The Country Drifters recorded some songs for
Sun Records in the 1950s, but this is basically his solo debut,
some 50 years later. He wrote all the songs, and they're about
such things as murders, drinking, and hard times -- in other
words, the usual, but with an uncommon style that is both
soft and severe. Simple stuff, it won't make your eyes flash
and glitter, it won't make your head explode, you'll just
sit back and let it sink in, like any sad American mist in
the air.

2005:
YEAR OF THE DOG

Our old
friends at Last Visible Dog are really kicking it into high
gear with the psychedelic compact disc releases. By my count,
they released TWENTY-SIX discs in 2005, and show no signs
of slowing down in the New Year. And they're sending Blastitude
HQ a copy of almost every damn one of 'em. Believe me, this
would be easy if they weren't all so good, but almost every
single one of these deserves some attention. Let's see if
I can't wrangle up some sort of label roundup here..... The
biggest surprise of the bunch is definitely Renato
Rinaldi's Hoarse Frenzy
CD. Out of all these releases, he's perhaps the artist I knew
the least about (turns out he's from Italy and has one or
two previous releases on Public Eyesore), but it's the album
I liked the most. I don't know what to call this music. It's
not drone, it's not noise, it's not improv, it's not folk.
It's pretty damn psychedelic, but isn't everything? It's a
guy sitting around his house playing stuff, in real time,
or is it? After all, it doesn't even really sound human, more
just like something the air might do. It IS drone, it is noise,
it is improv, it is folk. It's a guy sitting around his house
trying on different moods, slowly and patiently building them
up into song-forms. It seems like a one-take 45-minute performance,
and at the same time it seems like a well-rehearsed ambient
pop album with lots of overdubs. Last ish I said the Es album
Kaikkeuden kauneus ja käsittämättömyys
was the only album I had ever heard to specifically remind
me of Plux Quba by Nuno Canavarro. Well, all of a
sudden here's another one: Hoarse Frenzy by Renato
Rinaldi.
Let's see,
what else can I wrangle out of this absurdly large batch of
music from 2005 . . . . one recurrent theme seems to be releases
by solo dudes going under their given name, as with the aforementioned
Renato Rinaldi. Solo dudes do often make killer albums (even
when credited to their given name!), and this year the Dog
has proved this several times over. Example #2 is Stefano
Pilia, with Healing
Memories And Other Scattering Times, also from
Italy, also going by his real name (at least I assume), and
also recording drony music that is both traditionally lovely
and uniquely personal, otherworldy and arcane while also unabashedly
pleasant, like the soundtrack to a dreamy sci-fi movie where
nothing bad happens. Mr. Pilia is credited with "electric
guitar," "loops," and "feedback,"
and there are obvious guitar moves on the album, but mostly
I have no idea. Track 4 "The Holy Ghost Bird" is
especially gorgeous. And sidebar: checking the credits, I
notice the name Valerie Tricoli. She seems to be an important
part of the album, as she appears on two of the very best
tracks, playing "live electronics" on one, and "synth
and turntable" on the aforementioned "Holy Ghost
Bird." She also recorded four of the tracks, including
the two she played on. I google her name, and it turns out
she also plays music with Dean Roberts (ex-Thela, New Zealand
expat, key joiner-up with Tower Recordings), and was on his
Be Mine Tonight album, which crossed paths with me
briefly when it came out in 2003, sounding really intriguing
in a Talk Talk Spirit of Eden kind of way, and then
kind of disappearing. (It's still
available, and maybe I'll just go and order it, but it
seems to have disappeared in the sense that no one talks about
it much.) Anyway, there's another name from the worldwide
underground spiritual railroad: Valerie Tricoli (not to mention
Dean Roberts!). Third
new Last Visible Dog CD in a row by a dude going under his
given name: Humbled Down by Matthew
DeGennaro. If you're really an expert, you know DeGennaro's
name from a New Zealand-based long string drone duo he performed
in with Alistair Galbraith, back around the turn of the millennium.
(They released a CD called Wire Music in 1999, on
Corpus Hermeticum.) That's how I know his name, but this is
the first time I've ever heard him, and it's definitely not
long string drone. This is DeGennaro playing solo acoustic
guitar, and adding subtle Enoid overdubs -- sweet electronic
treatments going on in and around the corners, and sometimes
outright keyboard melodies, and is that a treated violin on
track six "Cathedral Square"? It's fingerpicking
stuff, post-Fahey of course, but in a very soft and pretty
style, without the thorns and roots of Fahey (after all, hardly
anyone else has 'em besides Chasny and Rose, right?), but
the ethereality works well -- thanks to those low-key floating
electronics, this unassuming album is actually shot through
with the same looking-down-on-heaven vibe as the Stefano Pilia.
Next
solo-dude release is Antony Milton with Sirens
/ And where the coloured planes are rafts, compiling
two albums he had previously recorded in 1997 and 1998. Mr.
Milton has been praised in these pages before -- we
reviewed two exquisite late-night fragile-drone releases
he recorded under the moniker A.M. (Episteme and
Strata), and he was interviewed
by LVD proprieter Chris Moon in Blastitude #16. Naturally,
I was excited to hear some new stuff by the guy, but this
album represents a different direction -- a late-night bedroom
folk-song style, basically acoustic guitar and voice. Alistair
Galbraith comparisons seem unavoidable, not just for the home-taping
song-sketch approach, but for the actual timbre of the singing
voice. However, Milton's songs are quite a bit more jittery
and caffienated -- they move faster, and seem a little 'punker'
if that means anything anymore. Not as dreamy and relaxing
as Galbraith, this album actually made me kind of nervous.
I felt a little more in sync with another solo Antony Milton
album released by LVD, this time under the guise
The Nether Dawn, called Whiskey
mute-down. This is a moniker he uses when the
works are instrumental deep-drone, not exactly noise, but
definitely more weighted down into the dirt than those high-floating
ultra-delicate A.M. releases.
Shifting away from New
Zealand to her paterfamilias, the
United Kingdom, we have Ashtray Navigations.
This is yet another solo dude project, the dude being one
Phil Todd, except when he's joined by other musicians, as
is the case with The Love That Whirrs,
which is like his 36th release overall and 1st for the Dog.
It's a pretty mammoth piece of work – almost 80 minutes
of music spread out over six heavy tracks. They tend to start
as intense sun-blinding drone-fields, but if you hold on tight
for a minute or two and adjust yourself to these new conditions,
you'll start to notice a wealth of detail, provided by a real
band of ringers. Todd has got Alex Neilson (Directing Hand,
the Jandek Blues Band) on shimmering, fracturing percussion
and Ben Reynolds on raga-style guitar and banjo. (Also, one
Melanie Delaney appears on one epic track, playing reeds &
tapes.) “Trash drone,” free skiffle, new electric
raga, sun blindness music, call it what you will, this is
a powerful statement. I love all the soul-scouring post-Matthew
Bower elevation-drones, but my real favorites are when the
band takes it down a notch and really chills the place out,
as on the lovely “Psychedelic Psamosa” and the
closing “Sho Shin Sky Poem.” And
the Last Visible Dog "complete unknown" factor strikes
again with Area C. It took months for me
to get this album, called Traffics and Discoveries,
into the player. I had about 12 other CDs to listen to from
the Dog alone, let alone the 1,112 non-Dog discs beyond that,
and (as can happen with the Dog but please don't let it stop
you) nothing seemed too stand-out about the cover/artist/title,
so I didn't think too much of it. But when it finally did
make it in, and its pronounced slow-bliss (sober Spacemen
3??) effects started to take hold, I'll be damned if it didn't
melt all of my stress and worries into small limpid pools
of protoplasmic aura that were, perhaps not coincidentally,
the very same color as the ambient green that bathes the CD
cover. Go figure! (Area C is another solo dude, this one from
Providence, RI -- LVD keepin' it local.) Oh
yeah, last and obviously not least is Last Visible Dog's The
Invisible Pyramid: Elegy Box, which might just
have to be THE album of the year. First of all, it's a six-CD
compilation, but the big news isn't the quantity, it's the
sheer quality. I've hardly ever heard even a single
disc compilation that is this staggeringly consistent -- 31
artists (around 5 per disc) are each given 10-20 minutes to
stretch out, and the finished product has a deep psychedelic
tone that is haunting, lovely, and elegaic indeed, and it
simply never lets up. (This issue's Popol Vuh award? Yes.)
I was playing one of the discs at work, and my co-workers,
who are not especially into drone music, requested another
one when it was over. In fact, on that day we listened to
4 of the 6 discs, with nary a complaint. That's high praise
indeed, trust me. Of course it's a little futile to talk about
individual highlights with this much quality, though early
standout tracks are by Sunken, Tomu tonttu, Fursaxa, and the
entirety of Disc 5, which is just a stunner, starting with
sublime work by Ashtray Navigations, then Peter Wright, then
two gorgeously expansive super roots tracks by another Providence,
Rhode Islander that I'm not previously familiar with named
Geoff Mullen, and then a suite by another Providence artist,
the band Urdog, that is perhaps even better than their really
good recent album Eyelid of Moon (on Secret
Eye), and finally the perfect closer, by Japan garage-psych
alchemists Miminokoto, that is perhaps even better than their
really good recent album Orange Garage (also on LVD).
And, as if all this
great music wasn't enough, the album's "elegy" concept
takes it to an even higher level. Inspired by the writings
of "naturalist, anthropologist, and essayist" Loren
Eisely (another great Nebraskan), the Elegy Box is dedicated
to extinct animal species, and for each of the 31 contributions
label head Chris Moon pens an elegant dedication, such as
"Dedicated to Hydrodamalis gigas, Steller's Sea Cow.
Native to the Bering Sea; discovered in 1741 and extinct by
1768. Slaughtered for meat and leather." Or, "Dedicated
to the Pteropus subniger, the dark flying-fox of Mauritius
and Réunion; disappearing from both in the late 1800's,
apparently the victim of deforestation and local hunting."
Or, "Dedicated to Nesiota elliptica, the St. Helena Olive.
This tree became rare in the 19th century when its population
was reduced to only 12 to 15 individuals due to felling, pests,
and fungal infections. In 1977 a lone tree had survived, perishing
in 1994." And, speaking of Urdog, their farfisa organist
Jeff Knoch contributes an additional longer essay that does
a nice, reasoned job of putting mankind in his proper place
on the scale of nature: really fucking low. Make sure you
read all this stuff while listening -- with six awesome discs,
you know you'll have enough time.
And jeez,
in the meantime, LVD has released even MORE compact discs
that I highly recommend, all of them in fact more so than
some (if not most) of the albums above that just got actual
reviews. They are by Fursaxa (Amulet,
voice loop lament from deep haunted space, mostly live stuff
and live she rules), Davenport (Free
Country, stoned, feral and rural), the aforementioned
Miminokoto (Orange Garage,
star-dusted deep-roots hard-rock trio), Mudboy
(This Is Folk Music, jesus, psychedelic
solo church-organ troubadour), and two separate massive 3-disc
stunners by Uton (Whispers From
The Woods, full-on vine-steam-and-shadow forest-breath)
and My Cat Is An Alien (The Cosmological
Eye Trilogy, impossible chasms of drone space).
Don't let this afterthought treatment dissuade you; I sincerely
recommend all six to psych heads of today who are interested
in a deep post-drone music that consistently rests at the
sweetest apex of light and heavy....

LIGHTNING
BOLT: Hypermagic Mountain CD (LOAD)I'm
telling you, I got an immediate rush of nostalgia when I took
Lightning Bolt's new CD Hypermagic Mountain out of
the bubble mailer it came to me in. The 'explosion in the
1970s Marvel Comics factory' cover art is enough all by itself,
but I had a feeling the disc was going to contain even more
rushes and explosions, in the form of new Lightning Bolt music,
so I quickly put it in the player, and when the first hooked-out
solo bent-bass strains tensed and then surge-released into
the drum-blast riffola of opener "2morromorro Land"
I was practically right there again, negotiating the wall
of thrashing humans at the Fireside Bowl in 2002 (Oops! The
Tour, night two). Song 2 "Captain Caveman" has lyrics
right out of a Uriah Heep song: "I don't know what you've
been told/that streets should be paved with gold/i can't know
just what you read/but health is all the wealth i need (sure),"
and somewhere in there are riffs that could indeed be arranged
for a well-produced 70s hard rock band, but run through such
a filter of post-noise recording aesthetics and post-television-and-internet-spazziness
that, well, yeah, you know. The Brian & Brian duo sounds
tigher than ever, with Chippendale's drums especially honing
their Pollock-splatter into a preposterous jazz-fusion time-keeping
frenzy, and, as with Wonderful Rainbow before it,
there are instro-hooks galore on here. Ah, but there was a
comment about Hypermagic Mountain on the Agony
Shorthand blog that I can't help but agree with, that
"there is no fucking low end on this record." This
is true -- the LB recording aesthetic has gotten noticeably
weirder and definitely more trebly. Yes, it would've been
amazing to hear all these new bombastic riffs with the same
monstrous roomsound production of (the terrific and I think
a little underrated) Wonderful Rainbow, but I do
think the Hypermagic production is an interesting
new spin, that makes them sound more like alien insects than
ever before. (The endless barrage of Randy Rhoads licks on
bass helps too, as do late-album excursions into -- Faustian!
-- cut-up concrete rock improv.)